According to CoreLogic, as reported by the Baltimore Sun today, “[n]early one in four Marylanders with a mortgage owed more on those loans than their homes were worth this spring, worse than all but six other states — and a large number of homeowners who can’t easily sell or refinance.”
Although the Baltimore region is running at a lower […]

All that is old is new again! Fannie Mae reported a net loss of $6.5 billion for the first quarter 2011, as a weakening housing market dashed hopes that the company had stabilized. Fannie said  would ask the government for a fresh taxpayer infusion of $6.2 billion after paying dividends to the Treasury. The loss […]

The never ending pipeline of shadow inventory – 1,800,000 homes in foreclosure while another 2,000,000 are underwater by 50 percent. No housing recovery without clearing out shadow inventory and expanding real household wages.
There will be no recovery until the shadow inventory is cleared out. This backlog of properties hangs over any sustainable housing recovery like a dark cloud […]

A report by the Post today discloses that Bank of America, haunted by ongoing pressure in both the robosigning/fraudclosure scandals, and demands by the likes of Pimco and the New York Fed to putback billions of paper to the bank due to misrepresentations, is rapidly trying to dump $1 billion worth of toxic paper.
Is this […]

What’s old is new again. Just posted to www.ZeroHedge.com, is a fairly comprehensive and enlightening recap of the recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report which documents their stress testing of 53 large banking holding companies and published its findings last month.
This report and analysis is not only objective, but it’s consistent with many postings on this Blog. All […]

Finally, some good news. Commercial real estate markets across the U.S. continued on their trend of improvement in the second quarter 2010, according to Moody’s. The news is more than welcome, in that some upward pricing movement is always a good sign for the market, if not for the industries psyche. But the long-standing problems are […]

When banks fail, who’s getting their hands on the distressed properties taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC)?

Here is one of the pieces of the distressed market puzzle ……
Read the full WSJ article.

The Opportunity: A partnership between Colony Capital LLC and a minority-owned investment firm won the bidding for a $1.85 billion portfolio […]

Fitch reported today the commercial real estate (CRE) values continue to decline giving rise to greater loan losses on CRE. On the average throughout 2009, lenders recovered ONLY 43 cents on the dollar on distressed loans. And there’s more bad news; they see the loss rate only going up.

The average loss severity rate or the ratio […]

ALARMINGLY, today we discover that more than 1.2 million households [have been] lost to the recession, according to a report issued this week by the Mortgage Bankers Association that looked at data between 2005 and 2008.
That number doesn’t include information from 2009, when job losses and foreclosures continued to rise. So it’s likely that the […]

The news is not good in the world of commercial real estate. As they say, what went up, will come down. And it is coming down, and fast. Here are the facts; steep declines in price, supply and demand:

Prices declined: The latest release of the MIT Center for Real Estate’s Transaction Based Indices for commercial […]